The service is cute. No doubt about it.<p>All the best to the team to find a way to monetize, however. Seems like the advertising route may be the most promising.
Giphy's among numerous sites I've blocked at the domain level because the principle use is to create an annoyance: animations which cannot otherwise be blocked or stopped, frequently used to directly annoy those who've stated that they don't care for such things.<p>Aside: two of the biggest blow-ups I've seen in social media have been between those who don't, and do, like animations. Go figure.<p>Unless and until user tools (e.g., browsers) put this control directly in users' hands, I don't see the situation improving.
Despite Giphy's broad distribution network, it doesn't seem that Gif Artists can be compensated for their labor in the way Youtube Creators can.<p>Nor would a watermarked Gif Ad, like the one I just saw for Netflix's "War Machine" provide much more than what amounts to CDN hosting fees for Giphy's platform. Minus any content licensing.<p>Hiring and developing Gif talent, building a Creators' Studio and marketing any resulting new IPs falls into the same conundrum: endusers copy, share and consume Gif images freely.<p>As for mobile ads, its the engagement, such as redeeming a Memorial Day promotion code for Lyft, that is monetized. Not the content.<p>We could hypothesize and analyze the remaining possible revenue models but unless Gifs can somehow be transmuted into some sort of cryptocurrency or other store of value, I am just having a hard time wrapping my head around this one.<p>How do you build Paywalls for Gifs? And aren't Snap and Insta Stories the new "micro reality entertainment" channels?<p>Wishing Alex and co. best of luck!
Giphy employs 70 people. This I find an astonishing high number.<p>It also seems that they are partnered with netflix to automatically create gifs from their content; this is interesting. But what about content providers who aren't so happy about unauthorized clips being created of their content - I would have thought giphy is a copyright disaster, should owners assert their rights.
I think advertisement and licensing/subscription are the way go along with providing a motion recognition engine. They have gifs which are basically frames of motions. Wouldn't be good to have a search engine tells you which movie this gif was based on, an anotation like genius for explaining memes and slangs?
They have a search API with a public key <a href="https://github.com/Giphy/GiphyAPI" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Giphy/GiphyAPI</a> with limits. I used it in one of my apps. Pretty cool stuff.
There are VC-funded startups that fulfill a semi-real need, but lack any potential to become a real business. "Advertising" isn't a business model; it's a crutch one reaches for when an existing business isn't financially sustainable on its own.<p>Giphy should be an open source library or app, or perhaps a community-supported site, that people would use on occasion. Expecting it to drive traffic that justifies a VC-scale investment will only dilute a generally useful service and cause it to fall by the wayside when the VCs pull out.
Go to <a href="https://giphy.com/" rel="nofollow">https://giphy.com/</a> and take a look. Does this random collection of animated images give the impression of a service worth 600 million dollars? It's just fluff, it doesn't solve any real-world problem, how on earth would any VC be brave enough to invest $150m in this juvenile idea?
Giphy is the slowest, buggiest site I sometimes have the displeasure of using. Unusable on mobile if you ever get linked to it, the search is mostly useless and results are irrelevant. Loading an actual gif takes ages.<p>Just giving stuff away for free and expecting to be able to slap on a business model later just seems like a recipe for failure in general, only very few companies manage to survive, let alone thrive, with that start.